A rare grampus dolphin, rescued 18 months ago after it swam into an Italian
port, seems to be dying of a broken heart after the woman who reared it like her
own child was murdered.

Tamara Monti, 37, the creature's keeper, was stabbed to death two weeks ago
by the man who lived in the flat above her. Police found an unemployed man,
Alessandro Doto, 35, standing in the street outside the block where they lived,
frozen like a dummy with a blood-spattered knife in his hand. He told them Ms
Monti's two dogs barked all day and it drove him mad.

The issue had been simmering between them for months. Ms Monti and her
partner had found a new place to live with their cat and dogs and were due to
move the next day.

Ms Monti was from the Lake Como region, hundreds of miles north-west of
Riccione, a resort on the Adriatic coast just south of Rimini, but Riccione had
taken her to its heart. The town was in mourning on hearing of her death. But no
one missed her like Mary G.

The grampus dolphin was a calf in June 2005 when she and her mother blundered
into the port of Ancona, south of Riccione, and ran aground. They were rescued
and brought to hospital, but Mary G's mother died three days later. After two
months the dolphin had recovered sufficiently to be brought to Oltremare Park in
Riccione, a seaside theme park, where she was given a pool of sea water and the
constant attendance of experts. They bottle-fed her a mixture of herring,
vitamins and mineral salts, rocked her like a baby and gave her swimming
lessons. But only one of the keepers talked to her as if she were her own child,
and that was Ms Monti.

As Mary G grew, she became the park's big attraction. Her fame spread through
Italy, via websites, television programmes and blogs. Visitors flocked to
Riccione to see her.

"We wanted to return her to the open sea," said Sauro Pari, head of the
organisation that runs the park, "but international experts advised against it.
They told us she would not survive."

Instead the grampus dolphin with the comical rounded forehead and
cartoon-like grin, and her surrogate mother, remained together - for life, or so
it appeared.

But now Mary G is dying. The word began to spread within days of Ms Monti's
murder, through the blogs and websites devoted to her. One message read: "Since
Tamara's death, Mary is unwell. Let's help her." She would either refuse her
diet of milk and squid, or eat it then spew it out.

Mary G's weight plummeted from 210kg to 160kg in a couple of weeks. As
happened 18 months ago, she is being attended by specialist vets, but has so far
failed to respond to treatment.

At the theme park, dolphin experts are going out of their way to deny any
firm connection between the keeper's murder and the dolphin's sickness. They say
there is a simple explanation for her rejection of food: an intestinal parasite
which she could have acquired at any time.

"From a strictly scientific point of view we absolutely cannot assert that
the two facts are connected," Mr Pari said. "But there is no doubt that her
grief for the death of Tamara is great. We are very worried about what will
become of her."